1. Related Technical Fields
Related technical fields include electronic voting machines, and in particular, electronic voting machines that initialize, consolidate, and/or transmit voter and/or vote information to a central facility for tabulation.
2. Related Art
Electronic voting machines are increasingly used in elections at a world level, particularly, direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines. DRE voting machines record votes by means of a ballot display provided with mechanical or electro-optical components that can be activated by the voter. A DRE voting machine, interacting with the voter, receives, accepts and processes vote data by means of a computer program, and records votes in a memory.
In 1998 the Federal Election Commission issued performance and test standards for DRE systems. The 1990 FEC Standards encompass DRE voting systems that record votes by means of a ballot display provided with mechanical or electro-optical devices that can be actuated by the voter, that process the data by means of a computer program, and that record voting data and ballot images in memory devices, such as, for example, data cartridges, internal memories, or external memories. The disclosed DRE produces a tabulation of the voting data as a hard copy or stored in a removable memory device.
Further, in conventional DRE voting systems it is often necessary to remove a memory device from the DRE machine and physically transport the memory devices to a central location for tabulation, which requires that the memory devices are collected by personnel, identified, marked, packed, and subject to manual control.
In many instances in a given election, a State or a County makes use of their existing inventory of voting equipment, which can include machines of various types, from different vendors, and having disparate technological levels. In fact, varied voting machines are employed concurrently, even in the same precinct. Optical Scanning voting machines usually produce cartridges where precinct counts are stored, and likewise, said cartridges need to be collected and physically taken to a tallying facility in order to be processed.